


I Could Give All to Time Except

by AstroGirl



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Books, Character Study, Gen, Pre-Notpocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:34:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22011163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: Glimpses into Aziraphale's relationship with books, and with humanity.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19
Collections: Genprompt Bingo Round 17





	I Could Give All to Time Except

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "priceless." I stole the title from [Robert Frost](https://www.poetseers.org/contemporary-poets/robert-frost-poems/i-could-give-all-to-time/). It seemed sort of appropriate.

Aziraphale was skeptical about writing at first. The practice of making marks on clay for tallying livestock or as receipts for deliveries of copper seemed practical enough, if not terribly interesting. But once they began writing down their songs and stories? He found it all rather worrying, and he was hardly the only one. 

Would this mean the end of the humans' lovely oral storytelling tradition? The end of epic poetry set to the strains of reed pipe and lute, of voices and music holding audiences rapt late into the night? The thought was positively heartbreaking, and Aziraphale found himself hoping that this newfangled way of doing things would never truly catch on.

He has, of course, come around to the idea since.

**

Many of Aziraphale's books (and scrolls, and tablets, and unbound sheets made from papyrus or tree bark or vellum) are priceless in the most literal sense possible. They have no price because he will not give them one, and he is the only who knows of their existence.

He sometimes wonders if he should feel guilty, just a little, for hoarding such things. For keeping them to himself when, as products of human beings, they properly belong to humanity. But then he thinks, well, if the humans had valued them more, it wouldn't have been left to an angel to preserve the only remaining copy.

In any case, he prefers to think of himself as holding them for humanity. For safekeeping. One day they'll thank him. Just... perhaps not quite yet.

**

He is especially drawn to their works of religion and prophecy. He's aware that there is an irony there. He knows more about such things than any human ever could. They get so much wrong about angels, about the Almighty, about how things were in the early days of the world. They leave so much out. Aziraphale has never known quite what to think, for instance, about the one deeply confused and deeply confusing line about him that made it into the semi-arbitrary collection of holy writings that became the Bible.

But there's something compelling about it all, nonetheless. About these glimpses into how humanity sees his kind. What they think of angels and demons, miracles and temptations. Of the Ineffable Plan. And there's something poignant in their attempts to imagine and comprehend a future whose predetermined end Aziraphale has always known.

He turns to them, sometimes, when he finds himself doubting his place, questioning his nature. They don't provide him with answers, not really, but they do offer a valuable outside perspective. Or even just a reminder that Heaven's perspective isn't the only one that matters.

Sometimes, they remind him that he's made a difference. That humanity has noticed some of his efforts, even if they haven't entirely understood them. Sometimes he rather needs that.

**

Religious works or secular, Aziraphale appreciates them all. For some of them, he may be the only one who can. (Or one of only two who can, perhaps, but the other enjoys his facade of literary indifference far too much to admit it.)

Some of them are written in languages that have passed from the world forever. Many of them reference things – events, people, the small, ephemeral, achingly vibrant details of human culture – that no human now alive can remember or understand.

Always, they bring back memories. The smell of smoke and spices in a marketplace long since covered in sand. The voice of a man or a woman whose body is no longer identifiable even as dust. The taste of a delicious dish whose recipe has been lost for a thousand years.

He supposes this is why humans these days like to look at photographs. To remember things as they once were, and the faces of those who are gone. Or to revisit, just for a moment, the youth of a child who has grown.

The humans aren't his children, of course. They are God's. But he is something in the nature of a guardian to them. In loco parentis, perhaps. And for all their maddening tendencies, he is _very_ proud of how they've grown.

Put that way, it seems only natural that he should keep for himself this collection of memories. Only natural that he should refuse to part with them at any price.

Anyone with a family would understand.


End file.
